IB Geography C.4.2 Increasing Competition for Access to Resources Notes

Resource Competition Reflects Unequal Rights and Power

1. Extreme environments contain water, minerals, hydrocarbons, grazing land and transport routes that attract users operating at local, national and global scales.
2. Competition intensifies when demand rises, access becomes easier or environmental change reduces the reliability of an existing resource.
3. A legal licence may grant extraction rights without resolving customary land use, cultural value or downstream environmental effects.

Stakeholders Exercise Different Forms of Power

1. Indigenous groups contribute place-based knowledge and may hold customary or treaty rights, but they can face weaker legal and financial capacity than governments or corporations.
2. Civil-society organizations provide research, advocacy and legal support, although they may not represent every local viewpoint.
3. Transnational corporations control investment, technology and access to global markets, giving them influence over project design and employment.
4. Governments issue permits, collect revenue and pursue security or development goals, while different ministries and scales of government may disagree.
5. Militia groups can tax, seize or disrupt resources where state authority is weak, turning competition into a source of finance and territorial control.

The Arctic Concentrates Competing Claims

1. Warming, technology and commodity demand have increased interest in Arctic shipping, hydrocarbons and minerals while simultaneously damaging ice-dependent livelihoods and infrastructure.
2. States use exclusive economic zones and national regulation, while Indigenous peoples seek recognition of land, consultation and decision-making rights.

1. Companies may offer jobs, infrastructure and public revenue, yet spill risk, habitat fragmentation and altered migration routes create costs that are concentrated locally.

Yamal Shows How Gas Development and Reindeer Herding Overlap

1. The Yamal Peninsula in northern Russia contains major gas developments and is also used by Nenets herders who migrate seasonally with reindeer.

1. Pipelines, roads and industrial zones can interrupt migration routes or concentrate movement at crossing points, while wages and services create new economic opportunities.

1. Consultation, route crossings, compensation and environmental monitoring can reduce conflict, but they do not remove the unequal bargaining power between a strategic industry and mobile herders.

Militia Involvement Changes the Nature of Competition

1. In politically unstable arid borderlands, armed groups may control mines, wells, roads or checkpoints and convert resources into revenue.
2. Violence can block seasonal access, displace communities and weaken monitoring, so nominal state ownership does not guarantee effective control.
3. The Arctic example and militia-controlled settings differ in security context, but both show that resource access depends on institutions and territorial power.

Conflict Management Requires Procedural and Distributional Fairness

1. Procedural fairness concerns who participates, which knowledge is accepted and whether consent or appeal is meaningful.
2. Distributional fairness concerns who receives revenue, employment and services and who carries pollution, displacement or livelihood loss.
3. Recognition fairness concerns whether cultural identity, customary rights and relationships with land are respected.
4. Durable agreements combine clear rights, transparent revenue, independent monitoring, accessible grievance procedures and the ability to revise operations when impacts emerge.